


Marked

by Lassenby



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Siren Brick, Trans Brick, Trans Character, Unsupportive family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3233792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassenby/pseuds/Lassenby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One-shot inspired by dangermousse’s post: “au where brick wakes up with siren tattoos one day and is indeed the prettiest siren of them all”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marked

**Author's Note:**

> The numbered headers indicate age. :D

  
**42.**

When Brick stumbles in front of the mirror, vision bleary and sleep-crusted, with a shaving blade in one hand and soap in the other, he thinks he’s still dreaming. He puts the razor down. He touches the whorls on his shoulder and traces them down his arm, following the curling, winding vines that sprung up in the night. The blue marks look just like Lilith’s.

Brick feels too tired to still be asleep. He gives his thumb a lick and wipes it sideways across one of the marks, to smear it the ink. _A prank_ , he thinks. Gaige drew them, or Axton, maybe. Someone who doesn’t know.

The line doesn’t smudge.

**5.**

Brick sits on the stool, hands gripping knees that are drawn tightly together, shivering in just his underpants. The clipper’s buzz drowns out his sniffling. Tears slip down his cheeks. Little wisps of hair are severed by the buzzer’s blade and tumble over his shoulders, and he can suddenly feel air against his scalp. It makes him shiver harder.

“Stay still,” his momma says, and shears him like a sheep.

Brick tries, but its hard. With every curl of hair that brushes across his skin, that sticks to his neck and itches and tickles his shoulders, it becomes harder not to fidget. The tears come harder, too, until he’s practically sobbing, and his momma asks what the hell is wrong with him.

“It’s a boy haircut,” he says.

“Your big brothers are getting the same,” she says.

“Amanda too?”

His momma laughs.

Brick looks down at his lap. Locks of his own curly hair have fallen over his shoulders and come to pool there, and the sight of the hair - all that hair, _all of his hair -_ makes him feel sick.

**7.**

Brick’s reflection stares back at him from the dark, turned-off television screen. He studies himself for a moment, looks back down at the magazine, then back up. He adjusts the twist of fabric across his chest. He unties it, ties it again, and it starts to look more like the bow in the picture. Brick beams.

He’s learned how to do it from an article- ‘How to turn your boyfriend’s old shirt into a cute top’, and although Brick doesn’t have a boyfriend, he has big brothers with big t-shirts. He stole this one from Leo’s drawer. After wriggling his shoulders through the neck hole, followed by his arms, he’s knotted the sleeves like a bow over his chest.

It looks good. Not as good as the girl in the magazine, maybe, but it’s as pretty as he’s ever been. He’s still grinning goofily at his reflection when his brother swims up behind him in the dark glass.

Brick whirls around.

“What’d you do to my shirt?” Leo asks.

Brick doesn’t have an excuse, so he just shrugs his bare shoulders and backs up until he bumps the television. Leo matches his retreat with a lunge forward. He grabs Brick by the modified neckline of his shirt and twists the fabric around his knuckles.

“You ruined it! And it makes you look like a fag,” he scowls.

He releases Brick with a flourish so that Brick hits his head on the tv. Leo calls him a few more names, and Brick keeps his gaze down, eyes stinging, while his fingers bunch and unbunch at his sides.

This goes on until Brick swings a fist into his brother’s face. Leo stumbles back, clutching his nose, and Brick takes the chance to slip by. He shuts the door of their shared bedroom and turns the lock just as Leo slams into it. He pounds his fists against the door and yells and yells and yells.

Brick sinks down on the bed and waits for Leo to give up. Even after the pounding and screaming stops, he stays in the room. Leo will still be mad. He’ll probably tell their brothers, and they’ll be happy to help him beat the hell out of their youngest brother.

Someone knocks at the door, and Brick ignores it at first.

“It’s me,” says a small voice.

It’s Amanda, and Brick opens the door for her. It could have been a trick: a Trojan horse. Leo might have been standing right behind her, hands wrapped around her forearm, poised to twist if she refused to help him draw Brick out. It’s happened before.

Not today, though. Amanda stands alone. Brick lets her in, shuts the door softly, and locks it with a click. Amanda tells him that he looks pretty.

Brick had forgotten he was still wearing the modified top. He wraps his arms around his little sister, and she lets him cry into her shoulder.

**42.**

Brick tries everything to smudge the ink. He uses soap. He uses the rough side of a sponge. He uses his own fingernails, scratching hard enough to draw red welts across the skin. Nothing works. Looking down at that crisp, unmarred mark, that siren mark, Brick finally allows himself a tentative smile.

**9.**

On his ninth birthday, Brick doesn’t get any of stuff he asks for. Not the bike with the streamers and basket, not the jewelry stringing kit – boys wear jewelry too, he reminds his dad, but he doesn’t listen – and not the boots with puffballs on the laces. But his momma gets him something better. She gets him a puppy.

“Every boy needs a dog,” she says.

Brick barely hears her. The wriggling puppy licks his face, and he laughs.

“Can I name her?”

“She’s your dog,” his momma says, so he names her Priscilla.

Amanda catches him later and gives him one more present. It’s the boots. She stole them, but it’s the thought that counts. Brick loves his sister, then, more than he’s ever loved anyone or anything in his life. He wears the boots everyday, until, a week later, they mysteriously go missing.

**13.**

Brick watches the boy from the corner of his eye. He writes a name in his notebook, over and over. He dots the i’s with tiny hearts.

Liam.

Liam.

Liam.

He’s never felt this way before, never written any name in his notebook besides his own, neatly printed on top of his assignments. But, while he steals glances at the boy who sits two desks away, one name fills his head in time with his beating heart.

Liam, Liam, Liam.

He doodles hearts in all the margins. When the teacher calls for them to pass up their papers, Brick has nothing to hand in, and he quickly shuts his notebook. He stares at Liam with undisguised interest, just for an instant, but the boy catches him looking. He flashes Brick a smile that sets his heart on fire, and he blushes back down at his closed notebook.

**13, still.**

“Who’s Liam?” asks a boy. He holds the notebook above Brick’s head, so he has to jump for it, but the boy is tall, and Brick falls short.

Another kid holds his hands out, and the tall boy tosses the book to him.

He catches it. “That blond kid over there,” the boy says, waving the notebook toward someone. Brick lunges, arms outstretched, but before he can reach the boy, he swings around and throws the book to Liam.

He doesn’t even try to catch it. The book thumps off his chest and falls open at his feet. Of course, it opens to the page with the names and the margins full of hearts. Of course, Liam steps back as though the lines have become a tangle of biting snakes.

Brick was staggering after the book, but he pulls up short a few feet away from Liam. They stare at each other with matching expressions of red-cheeked horror.

Liam takes another step back and shakes his head. “I’m not gay.”

“I’m not either,” Brick says hurriedly.

The other boys laugh at this.

“I’m a guy,” Liam explains, as if Brick doesn’t know.

_But I’m not,_ Brick thinks. He bites his lip and says nothing.

He is a guy, after all, even if he doesn’t feel like it. He’s got a penis and a few wisps of chest hair that prove it, and no evidence to the contrary - nothing besides the deep-seated conviction he’d been born with.

**41.**

Brick tells everything to Mordecai one night, with his arms wrapped around the smaller man’s waist, voice muffled against his bare belly. Mordecai listens patiently, then asks, gently, if Brick still feels that way; If he feels like a woman.

“No. I dunno. It’s too late,” Brick sniffles against his boyfriend’s skin.

“It’s not too late.”

Brick shakes his head, tickling Mordecai into a squirm with his stubbly scalp. “I’d be an ugly woman.”

Mordecai’s thumbs touch Brick’s jaw. He tilts his head up to look at him, and their eyes meet, and he smiles.

“You could never be ugly.”

**14.**

Three boys have broken noses and one has a broken arm, and Brick knows that their parents will raise hell over it, but it’s too late to change anything. His brothers tried to stop him. Brick gave Leo a black eye, and they went home. Some kid lands a good hit, splits Brick’s lip halfway up his face and knocks him down. His head hits the ground with a crack. Glitter briefly fills the space behind his eyes, followed by nothing at all.

Amanda finds him. She takes him home. She’s a year younger than Brick, but she holds his blood spattered hand as though she were the older sibling. Blood runs out of Brick’s flayed lip, ribbons down his chin and drips on his shirt.

Priscilla runs on ahead, scaring up birds. She glances back at them with a wide, doggy grin. Amanda doesn’t ask what the boys did to deserve it. She doesn’t try to tell Brick that it’s going to be okay.

**15.**

There’s a box on Brick’s doorstep. It’s wrapped in shiny pink paper and topped with a glossy pink bow, and it’s got a tag with his name on it.

Brick stares at it for long enough to worry that one of his brothers will come home to find him gaping at the parcel. He has no reason to be scared, but he is. His palms sweat, his heart knocks against his ribs, and it doesn’t make any sense. The present looks nice. It’s neatly wrapped; prettily, even. Finally, with shaking hands, he picks up the gift from the porch.

He plays with the tag, turns it over. A single word is printed on the other side.

_Fag_.

Brick’s fingers shake even harder as he rips away the pink paper. Inside, he finds a shoebox. Inside that, Priscilla’s severed paw.

**16.**

Brick lifts weights. Brick does push-ups. Brick beats bullies until they’re crying and begging him to stop, grins at them with a split-lipped snarl, and sometimes he doesn’t stop. Brick tries not to think about anything.

**42.**

The blue marks show no sign of going away after three weeks. The edges are still clear, without streaking, blurring or fading. They are part of Brick’s skin.

Lilith doesn’t believe it. She says someone must have tattooed him in his sleep, or something.

“I think I woulda felt that, Lil,” Brick says.

“There can only be six sirens. Do you really think-”

“That I’m one of ‘em? I could be.”

Lilith rolls her eyes and gives up on trying to make him understand. At least she doesn’t remind him that only women can become sirens. She’s known him long enough to have gleaned the shape of the truth, if not the specifics, and she isn’t trying to hurt him. She just doesn’t want him to be disappointed.

A few days later, Brick comes across a dog lying in the street. He runs to its side and drops to his knees and lifts it’s face between two giant, scarred hands. It looks up at him with weary eyes.

Nasty, bloody holes pit the dog’s side. Someone’s been shooting at it. Kids, probably: teenagers trying to put their pain into someone else. Brick swears under his breath that he’ll kill whoever did this. He promises vengeance to a dog who can’t understand his words, but understands the kindness in his touch. Brick folds the dog into his arms. It closes its eyes.

A sensation comes over Brick, a feeling like his soul ripping in half, but softly- like tearing wet paper. Something blooms between the two halves. His marks begin to itch, first at the shoulder, then unfurling down his side and arm.

A faint tinkling sound draws his attention. It’s a bloody bullet, rolling into the street. While he’s looking down, another pokes out of one of the dog’s wounds and makes a splutch sound when it pops free. The dog whimpers.

Another surge of power courses from Brick’s hands and into the dog’s body, and forces the rest of the bullets out. They sound like hail against the street.

Brick sweeps a thumb over one of the seeping holes in the dog’s side. In its wake, pink flesh fills in the wound. He touches the others too, one at a time.

When the dog is whole again, it opens its eyes and blinks them owlishly. It scrambles onto its overlarge paws. Brick touches its flank, and it looks back, grinning, brimming with gratitude, and licks her face.


End file.
